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Clinton argued that her Republican opponent is not just dangerous and foolish but an unrepentant bigot.

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Hillary Clinton said voters should not be 'fooled' by Republican rival Donald Trump's efforts to rebrand his campaign while delivering a speech in Reno, Nevada on Thursday. Trump's real message, she says, is 'make America hate again.' (Aug. 25)

WASHINGTON—Quote by quote, tweet by tweet, Hillary Clinton made an argument Thursday with no precedent in America’s modern campaign history: that her opponent is not just dangerous and foolish but an unrepentant lifelong racist.

In a calm but blistering Nevada speech aimed in large part at moderate Republicans, Clinton systematically outlined Donald Trump’s alleged housing discrimination as a 1970s landlord, his offensive remarks about minority groups, and his embrace of conspiracy theorists, nationalist foreign leaders and the bigots of the online “alt-right.”

“Of course, there’s always been a paranoid fringe in our politics, steeped in racial resentment. But it’s never had the nominee of a major party stoking it, encouraging it and giving it a national megaphone. Until now,” Clinton said.

Clinton offered specific examples. At one point, she described Trump’s retweet of a Twitter user who goes by the name “WhiteGenocide™.” At another, to gasps from the crowd at a Reno college, she read out four incendiary headlines from Breitbart News, the far-right website run by his new campaign chief.

“From the start,” she said, “Donald Trump has built his campaign on prejudice and paranoia. He’s taking hate groups mainstream and helping a radical fringe take over one of America’s two major political parties.”

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The speech represented a deepening of Clinton’s strategy of separating Trump from the rest of his party. She favourably cited the way three previous Republican nominees, George W. Bush, Bob Dole and John McCain, handled racial matters.

“This is not conservatism as we have known it. This is not Republicanism as we have known it. These are racist ideas,” she said. “This is a moment of reckoning for every Republican dismayed that the party of Lincoln has become the party of Trump.”

The speech was preceded by Clinton’s release of an web ad that highlighted Trump’s popularity with the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists. It was intended to pre-empt Trump’s halting attempt to soften his image among both racial minorities and the moderate suburban voters who dislike how he has treated them.

Trailing in almost every swing state, he signalled this week that he is thinking about abandoning his key promise to deport all 11 million illegal immigrants. And he has tried this month to appeal to black voters, with whom he is historically unpopular, by depicting their lives and neighbourhoods as miserable — a tactic Clinton argued was itself a “dog-whistle to his most hateful supporters.”

“There’s an old Mexican proverb that says, ‘Tell me with whom you walk, and I will tell you who you are.’ We know who Trump is. A few words on a teleprompter won’t change that,” Clinton said. “He says he wants to ‘make America great again,’ but his real message remains ‘make America hate again.’”

The speech was described as effective by anti-Trump Republicans.

“Man, this speech was brutal, and completely justified,” Tom Nichols, a U.S. Naval War College professor, said on Twitter. “I hate Trumpers for making me feel good about a Clinton speech.”

Trump, who frequently tries to turn Clinton’s criticism back around on her, said this week that she is the real “bigot.” In his own Thursday speech, just before Clinton’s, he said she was trying to smear him and his supporters because she lacks policy solutions.

“Hillary Clinton is going to try to accuse this campaign, and the millions of decent Americans who support this campaign, of being racists,” he said in New Hampshire. “It’s the oldest play in the Democratic playbook: say ‘You’re racist, you’re racist, you’re racist.’ It’s a tired, disgusting argument. It’s the last refuge of the discredited Democratic politician.”

Directly addressing Clinton, he said: “I want you to hear these words, and remember these words: Shame on you.”

And Trump made a lengthy case in support of his claim that he and his supporters are not, in fact, racists. People who prefer tough immigration policies, he said, merely want “their jobs protected and their country kept safe”; people who warn of “radical Islam” and the threat of refugees merely want “to uphold our values as a tolerant society.”

Clinton’s speech, though, may hurt Trump by thrusting his most bigoted supporters into the national limelight — where they are excited to suddenly find themselves.

“We’ve made it,” Richard Spencer, the white nationalist credited with popularizing the term “alt-right,” wrote on Twitter this week.

For much of Thursday, one of the trending topics on Twitter was “#AltRightMeans,” on which members of a movement focused on protecting “white identity” and “white culture” offered definitions steeped in prejudice.

“#AltRightMeans recognizing equality is just a social construct,” one person wrote.

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